Magazine ArticlesCredenda|agenda: things to be believed, things to be donehttp://www.credenda.org/index.php/Table/Childer-On-Child-Rearing/
Sat, 10 Dec 2016 01:04:24 +0000Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Managementen-gbSibling Rivalryhttp://www.credenda.org/index.php/Childer-On-Child-Rearing/sibling-rivalry.html
http://www.credenda.org/index.php/Childer-On-Child-Rearing/sibling-rivalry.htmlRivalry between children is easy to see and lament, but the mainspring that makes the rivalry work is somewhat more difficult to identify. The sin that creates this rivalry is the sin of envy, but envy is the kind of sin that hides or cam­ouflages itself quite effectively. It does worried parents no good to know that “envy is in there somewhere.”

Rene Girard has identified the mechanism of this rivalry very ably, and as parents use his insights to study what is going on they will have a better grasp of what makes their kids tick—not to mention everybody else they know. Simple desire is a function of wanting something for its own sake. A straightforward example would be a thirsty man who wants a drink of water. This desire is built-in by God, and no one has to teach it, or model it. Newborn babies want milk, crying for it, and when they are first born they are not competing with anyone for it. The competition comes later—and sooner than you might think.

Triangular desire complicates things quickly. In trian­gular desire you have the subject who wants something, the object that is wanted, and a model who bestows desirability on the object by wanting it first. The subject wants the same object that the model wants, but what he really wants is to be like the model. This is the key to understanding all sibling rivalry. The older brother wants a bike, and so younger brother wants a bike too. But what the younger brother really wants is to be like his older brother, and the bike is just the necessary prop. The bike is just there to confuse the parents.

Some might think this is far too simplistic because, they say, “when we bought the younger brother a bike also, it didn’t help. The conflict just got worse.” This is because the desire goes deep, well past bike level. What the younger brother really wants is what the older brother got, which was not simply a bike, but “a bike first, from dad, to his beloved first born son.” And you can’t fix that by buying a second bike. The problem is underscored by the insulting fact of the second bike. It is not resolved at all.

Another way of putting this is that not all desires are for physical objects. Children who compete over objects are frequently doing so because of the symbolic value those objects have—they represent honor or love or status in the family. And this is why competition can turn vicious when the stakes are so low—because the stakes are not re­ally the stakes.

This can even get more complicated. A model (I almost wrote model child, which is another complicating factor) can desire something in a lackluster fashion—if he were the only kid, he could take or leave the bike. But when his brother comes after him fiercely for it, he recognizes its deep value and clutches it far more tenaciously than he did before. In other words, a reciprocal triangular desire can develop. The younger child wants something because the older child wanted it first, and the older child starts to want it deeply because the younger child wanted it deeply first. They are jostling together, each of them deriving the strength of their desire from the strength of the other’s desire. And of course, if it were just the bike, one of them could resolve the conflict by just letting go.

But it is not just the bike. In the scenario sketched out above, the older brother has the bike as the first-born son, and the bike symbolizes that status—a placement which cannot be undone, and that is why the younger brother wants it so much. And if the older brother determined that he was going to be Joe Godly in the conflict and give up the bike for the sake of his brother, that is just the kind of thing that an older brother would do, and now the younger brother wants to be like that.

I have been using the example of older brother/younger brother because it is a very common problem for parents. But the dynamics involved in this can function in any number of situations. The same thing can happen (only nastier) when the younger brother has more confidence, more gifts, and is clearly enjoying God’s favor. The biblical examples of Joseph and David some to mind.

In order to do something about this, parents should recognize that the competition is really over the children’s relationship with them. And there are two aspects of the parents’ prayers, discipline, and instruction. The first is to discipline for the outbursts of envy, and the second is to discipline in an undistracted way—not to be confused by “the bike,” of whatever the conflict was over. In the context of this discipline, the instruction (and attitudinal example) coming from the parents has to show that their parental favor is given freely, and cannot be wrested away by competition.

This is not done by warning the kids that envious competition incurs a fundamental relational disfavor—that will just make things worse. Without repentance, the child knows that he is running a deficit, and he will do the only thing he knows how to do to get out of it . . . which is more competition. Any attention is better than no attention.

]]>dougwils@christkirk.com (Douglas Wilson)Childer: On Child-RearingFri, 16 Oct 2009 05:43:11 +0000Your Kid's Facebookhttp://www.credenda.org/index.php/Childer-On-Child-Rearing/your-kids-facebook.html
http://www.credenda.org/index.php/Childer-On-Child-Rearing/your-kids-facebook.htmlKids need to be brought up in such a way that two condi­tions are met. First, parents must provide their children with guidance, correction, encouragement, teaching, and direction. Second, parents must love their children in such a way that the children grow up wanting these things.

At the same time, whether or not the children want guidance and direction needs to be measured by the video, and not by the snapshot. At the moment of correction, children are like the rest of us and don’t enjoy it very much. No discipline seems pleasant at the time. But the wise know that faithful correction is oil for our heads (Ps. 141:5), and faithful children understand this as well. It pro­tects us, and does not destroy us. Over the course of time, children should want their parents to set limits for them, and to bring them up in such a way that they continue to be eager for those limits.

Some parents excel in defining limits, setting boundar­ies, making rules, lecturing, teaching, explaining, and cor­recting. They do not do so well at getting the kids excited about conforming to the standard. Other parents have a great personal relationship with their kids, lots of good talks, but they are too indulgent and such parents often leave the kids wishing they had more direction.

The reason kids need direction and wisdom is that there are many areas of life where the right thing is not the obvious thing. Teenagers generally don’t need to be told that serial bank robbery is not the way to go. “But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Heb. 5:14). The mature are those who through long practice have learned to distinguish between things that are a good idea and those things which are not a good idea. This cannot be done without practice—long experience. And the areas where it must be done are those areas where the wise course of action is not immediately apparent to many people.

Wise parenting does not begin with the task of keep­ing kids away from pornography or pot or shoplifting. If a parent is struggling with holding the line at these places, then it is likely that they did not offer direction and input on other less obvious issues much earlier. Parents have multiple opportunities to teach their children the difference between wisdom and folly when the stakes are much lower. For example, suppose an opportunity arises for your thir­teen-year-old daughter to go to a slumber party, an event where the girls are likely to stay up until two in the morning accompanied by a tangle of unedifying gossip. Going to this event doesn’t break any of the Ten Commandments in an obvious way—all the girls are classmates in a Christian school—so what should Dad say? And if he says no, then how can he do it in such a way that his daughter comes to appreciate (within a day or so) his wise protection of her? Or let’s take an Internet analog of slumber parties, which would be something like Facebook.

In any setting, when kids get together without paren­tal direction and supervision, two things will happen—and they will happen for the same reason that weeds grow in your garden. The first will be that the conversation will drift downward into the silly and inane. Once that tone is set and established, some people will introduce some real sin. They will wait a bit to introduce it because teens steeped in the silly and inane are not equipped to stand up to real sin. Laziness is not preparation for battle, and so when battles do come to the lazy, they are usually short battles. Silly and inane conversation revolves around trivi­alities, superficial feelings, flatteries, flirting, and so on.

If a Facebook account is allowed in the first place, any father worth his salt is going to insist on being a “friend” (and how uncool is that!) so that he can check in on how the scintillating conversation is going. As he moni­tors what is going on, he will probably realize that his son is a lot more intelligent as a conversationalist at the dinner table than he is here. More intelligent, less self-absorbed, more fun to listen to. But here he is on Facebook, hair in his eyes, whining about something or other, just like he was some fussybutt alternative rock white guy with problems. But so far dad just thinks this is irritating. Then some skanky girl from somewhere in New Jersey pops up on the page, blouse unbuttoned like there was no tomorrow, says something really inappropriate, all the while acting like she really knows your son well, and that she really thinks he is hot. Huh, thinks you. You think you remember meeting her at that Christian family camp you all went to last summer. Now what?

The point is not to march into your son’s bedroom and pull the plug on his computer and say, “That is all with that.” The point is to lead and guide your children so that they see what you see and act accordingly. If you have a good relationship with them, they will be hungry for that kind of direction. If you do not have that kind of relation­ship with them, then a simple imposition of standards they do not comprehend and do not love will not help you out in the long run. The question that parents face here is how they can impart authoritative and loving guidance in a way that will be accepted and appreciated.

]]>dougwils@christkirk.com (Douglas Wilson)Childer: On Child-RearingThu, 15 Oct 2009 04:18:22 +0000Competence and Dogmatismhttp://www.credenda.org/index.php/Childer-On-Child-Rearing/competence-and-dogmatism.html
http://www.credenda.org/index.php/Childer-On-Child-Rearing/competence-and-dogmatism.htmlCompetence does things well, by definition. Boys, especially when they are little, do not do things well. Competence wants to step in and do what needs to be done, now, and rarely has the patience to teach someone who is going to fumble around with it. It is always easier for a competent father to “just do it himself” than spend time messing around with two or three goes. But the end result of this is that the son can grow to adulthood without ever having learned how to do the most basic things. Someone more competent always has a tendency to step in, and it is not long before the son learns to hang back—thus exasperating the father, who wishes that the son would show more initiative.Dogmatism can be reasonable, or it can be of the blustery, bow-wow variety. Knowledge is impossible apart from dogmatism, but problems arise when a father is unhelpfully dogmatic in his household, the basis for his dogmatism not being that it is epistemologically necessary for us in order to say anything, but rather because he is the tallest in that family and has the deepest voice. He therefore opines regularly on whatever it is, and brooks no room for discussion or disagreement. His dogmatism takes up all the oxygen in the room.The end result of both these will be sons who do not know how to do for themselves, and sons who do not know how to think for themselves. At the base of this may be a worry on the part of some fathers that their paternal position will be threatened if they are not careful. A son who becomes competent might become as competent, or even more competent. A son who learns to think might come to know as much as his father does, or perhaps more. The ancient Roman orator Quintillian once commented that a son is the only man on earth that a man will gladly be surpassed by. This is frequently true, but it is not universally true. Plenty of fathers are threatened by their sons and want to keep them safely to the rear.A father who is competent and dogmatic will tend to have a critical eye. In the perennial glass half-full, glass half-empty problem, it needs to be pointed out that both positions are exactly right. A glass half-full actually is half-empty. That is objectively true. And so when a man is competent and dogmatic in his daily interactions with his son, it should not be surprising that he will tend to be very critical with his son, and the son will (usually) withdraw in some sort of way to protect himself. Over the years I have been struck by how many strong fathers I have met who appeared to have passed on nothing but weakness to their sons. Other fathers have seen their strength of character reproduced in their sons. What is the difference?The difference is between a father who rises to meet the challenge of a potential competitor, and a father who rises to meet the challenge posed by an opportunity to die for another. In the former situation, a man wants to talk sense when someone else is talking nonsense, to do well when someone else is doing poorly, to be the center when someone else is trying to function at the center. A son reflects on his father, and unless a man is willing to be embarrassed from time to time, he will step in so that he is the one reflecting on himself, directly. He doesn’t want other people making him look bad. In the latter situation, a father just lets it go. But in this the words of the gospel are fulfilled, because what a man grasps for, he cannot have, and what he lets go of, he is given forever.So the irony is that a man who is not willing to let his son make him look bad . . . winds up looking bad. And a man who is willing to work over a period of years with his son, for his son’s benefit and not his own, is a man who is willing to look bad—but he doesn’t.A son who is suffocated with competence and dogmatism (in the negative sense I have been describing) is a son who, as he grows up, will feel like he needs to seek oxygen somewhere else. When he grows up and goes to college or joins the Navy, he finds himself ill-equipped to handle what is thrown at him. His performance is frequently poor, and this just goes to “reveal” to him and to his father that his father was right all along. But it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And when he performs poorly like this, he is not going to want to come home for a visit. Why come home just to be reminded of the place where you became a loser in the first place?One other point, closely related. Often men like this are highly respected by their wives, and such a man cannot figure out how his wife can think so much of his abilities (which she really does) and still be worried about what a poor father it appears that he is being. But there is no contradiction here. He is stumbling over his abilities—he is muscle-bound. The choice is not between being capable and incapable. The choice, as a father brings up his boy, is between being capable for oneself and capable for another.]]>dougwils@christkirk.com (Douglas Wilson)Childer: On Child-RearingThu, 17 Sep 2009 19:12:58 +0000